


your heart is only as red as the blood within

by darkenergies



Category: the GazettE
Genre: Gen, eventual psychological manipulation, hannibal (tv) au, kinda dialogue-heavy, oh and did i mention a Whole Lotta Murder?, references to cannibalism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 23:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7911169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkenergies/pseuds/darkenergies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takanori glared. “Don’t psychoanalyze me. You won’t like me when I’m psychoanalyzed.”</p><p>[DISCONTINUED INDEFINITELY]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> if you've watched hannibal, you'll pick up character associations quickly. this fic will largely follow the plot of season 1, but slightly abbreviated and with some differences due to the personalities of the gazette members and the backstories i've created to fit. if you haven't watched hannibal, you should watch it, but for now, enjoy the ride.
> 
> (i haven't written fic in 5 years i hope this is okay)

> One of the most notorious serial killers in the modern history of Japan is the Tokyo Ripper. While the Ripper has yet to obtain a double-digit body count, he is most known for the theatrical displays his victims’ bodies are discovered in. The first discovered victim of the Ripper was a girl found in Shibuya, body suspended from rafters from hooks embedded into her skin, dressed in a pure white dress that hid her stitched up chest and missing heart…

_Screams echo around the room of the recently abandoned warehouse, bouncing off the walls and gradually fading as the next join them. It’s a cacophony that sounds almost like music to his ears. The sound of it could give those newfangled noise rock bands a run for their money with some distortion. He smiles as he drives another metal hook into her arm, watching the skin tear as crimson flows out and drips into the plastic bucket below. He can almost imagine the drip drip drip of the blood droplets creating a beat for the melody hidden in her screams. She won’t bleed to death, not yet; a selection of surgical knives and a bone saw sit quietly gleaming to the side, just begging to be used._

Takanori shook his head, trying to focus on the article again. But really, what was the point when looking at the picture of the body already told him all he needed to know? He needs to write a short essay on the motive of the Ripper by next class and he’d already spent fifteen minutes daydreaming about (or reliving, or emphasizing with, whatever you want to call it) the death of the first victim. Sighing, he looked at Akira’s copy of the article, half-highlighted as he dozed across from him. Even Akira was further along the article than him. That’s an achievement.

Releasing another sigh, Takanori decided to skim to the end of the article, hoping the author discussed his view on the Ripper’s motive after going through all the victims.

> Since no one, incarcerated or otherwise, has ever admitted to being the Ripper, his true motives remain unknown. However, the brutal, inhuman way he treats his victims seems to suggest feelings of anger and rage and his dramatic displays may point to a feeling of inadequacy and a desire to be noticed. The Ripper has been inactive for the past year…

Takanori barely suppressed the urge to crumple the article into a ball and throw it out the window. He ought to go find that idiot who wrote the article, a certain R. Maruyama, and punch him in the face. How could someone be so utterly wrong about a killer’s motive? Looking at the picture of the Ripper’s first victim, Takanori already knew that the Ripper didn’t hate this girl, he saw her as...a body. A medium. Something he could transform into something beautiful. The Ripper was an artist, and he created with flesh and blood as his paint.

Objectively, Takanori mused, flipping through the photos, the Ripper’s work would be in a museum if it had been created out of anything but human bodies.

Luckily, before he could lose himself in reenacting one of the Ripper’s murders in his own mind again, Akira woke up, blearily rubbing his eyes. “Taka, why’d you let me fall asleep?” he whined.

“I was actually trying to focus on my work and pass this class, dumbass.”

“You’re an art student. You’re just taking this class for elective credit while I actually have to…”

“Criminal psychology inspires my art.”

“If you call those splatters of red paint in the spare room art, sure.”

“Shut the fuck up, Akira.”

\---

Takanori knew his essay was controversial. He’s probably the only person in the class who so vehemently disagreed with the author’s view on the Ripper’s motive. Honestly, he was just waiting for the day he would receive another strongly worded email about perhaps having a word with the psychologist at the student health center.

What he didn’t expect, though, was to walk into the small apartment he shared with Akira and Kouyou to find a police officer sitting on the beat-up old couch. He stared until a soft crashing noise sounded from the spare room and looked up to find two more officers toting the still-unfinished painting he started on Monday out of the room with latex gloves.

 _His_ paintings. The canvases that remind him that the screams and blood that he imagines every time he sees a picture of a dead body aren’t his fault, that _he is Takanori Masumoto and he is not a murderer_.

How _dare_ the police show up in his apartment and search and disturb his most personal paintings, the ones he would not even think about displaying in a gallery, the ones no one has seen but himself?

So really, it’s not his fault when the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Put my painting back in the room where it belongs or so help me I’ll turn your body into a painting!”

And naturally that’s when the officer on the couch got up and twisted his arms around his back, securing his wrists into handcuffs.

\---

The interrogation room was bright white fluorescent lights and cold metal furniture. The one-way mirror on the wall did nothing to alleviate the compressing feeling of the room; it only coldly reflected Takanori’s face back at him. The neutral stare of the investigator before him only made Takanori want to go home and make some hot green tea and play Mario Kart with Akira and Kouyou. He thought he ought to be a bit more intimidated by the whole situation, really.

The investigator before him exhaled and opened his manila folder. “Takanori Masumoto.”

This is like something straight out of a television crime show, thought Takanori, cut the drama already. “Yes, that’s me. Glad you know my name. Can you skip the bullshit and tell me why I’m here?”

The investigator looked unfazed. “What do you know about the Tokyo Ripper?” he asked.

Takanori glared for a moment, deciding whether he ought to answer, then sighed. “Nothing more than what I’ve read online and from newspapers when the case was active,” he replied, “And that article from my assignment the other day.”

“Anything else?” the investigator asked without missing a beat.

“Why, do you think I can hack your database of classified information? And why would I want to? I can write an essay using only publicly released information, you know, and I’m really not aiming to be the top of the class.”

Silence.

Takanori remembered that he wrote that essay on the Ripper at three in the morning and might have accidentally slipped some extra details in. And he wrote his essay arguing that the Ripper killed because he wanted to create art with human bodies. And he threatened to do the same thing to the officers in his apartment.

Well, that certainly explained things. Pouting, Takanori continued, “I’ve never killed anyone in my life, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

The investigator raised an eyebrow and pulled out a packet from his folder, not bothering to hide the cover page. Takanori’s essay. He flipped the page and read, “The Ripper tortured his victims before killing them; he saw suffering of the human body as something beautiful, as if the entire act of killing was performance art rather than a means to create a display with the body. The Ripper’s first victim has the hooks inserted into her arms while alive, for example-”

“I just have a bit of an overactive imagination, alright?”

“The fact that some of the Ripper’s most gruesome acts on the victims’ bodies were done premortem was never released to the public. How did you obtain this information?”

“I saw the photo in the article and interpreted them in a way that supported my thesis rather than the author’s! It’s not like I actually killed them or broke into police records! I didn’t do anything wrong and you have no actual evidence that I did!”

“This essay is suspicious enough. Not to mention your paintings.”

“I’ve always been a fan of horror movies. Do you arrest every person who likes horror movies?”

“It doesn’t change the fact that certain details in this essay and some of the paintings in your apartment closely match the crime scenes left by the Ripper and other serial killers. To anyone but someone who was actively investigating these cases it could be written off as an overactive imagination. But you weren't careful enough. So,” the investigator said, leaning closer to Takanori across the table with every word, “what do you know?”

“As I said, nothing.” Takanori refused to tell the investigator about his ability to imagine himself as a murderer every time he comes across a picture of a dead body. He’s not about to be sent to another shrink. He’s been dealing with it perfectly well, thank you very much.

The investigator pressed on. “You’re hiding something.”

“And it has nothing to do with the Ripper, just like I have nothing to do with the Ripper. Can I go home and take a nap now?” Takanori retorted.

The investigator sighed, writing down a note to do a deeper background search on one Takanori Masumoto. He turned off the recorder, signaling an end to the interview, and the door opened. Takanori released a large sigh, muttering something that sounded a lot like “finally” under his breath as he stood. He walked out of the room demanding his cell phone.


	2. chapter 1

A loud buzzing doorbell at ass o’clock in the morning was easily one the top ten worst things to wake up to, Takanori decided, flopping over and burying his face deeper into his pillow. A small voice in the back of his mind told him to get up and open the door, because someone showing up at his apartment this early obviously had to be on urgent business, but the bigger, louder voice was telling him to go the fuck back to sleep since he hadn’t gotten home from the gallery opening until three in the morning.

Takanori went back to sleep for what felt like two seconds before he was shaken awake. Wincing against the sunlight streaming through his window, he caught a glimpse of blond hair that looked suspiciously like Akira. Relieved that the intruder was a familiar friend who knew where the spare key was anyway, Takanori pulled his blanket up and went back to sleep.

Or he tried to, anyway. Akira ripped the blanket away from him and said something Takanori wasn’t quite coherent enough to catch to the other person in the room that Takanori hadn’t noticed before. “Akira, what the fuck,” Takanori grumbled.

“Please wake up because my boss is currently in the room and I had to practically beg to be here waking you up with my incredibly deep reserves of patience as your best friend because I couldn’t stop him from wanting to talk to you,” Akira replied in a rush, uncharacteristically stressed for this time of day.

Takanori groaned and yawned, finally focusing enough to look at the faces of the two others in the room. It took him a moment to recognize not-Akira, but when he did he immediately sat up and glared at him. “Akira, please tell me that is not your boss.”

Akira opened his mouth to answer, but not-Akira responded first with a cordial, “Good morning, Mr. Masumoto. Kasuhito Kusaka, from—”

“Nice to know your name after all these years,” Takanori interrupted.

Akira blinked, thoroughly confused. “Wait, you know each other?”

Takanori raised his finger, accusatory, towards Kasuhito, looking strangely terrifying for a man who was still in black and white polka-dot pajamas with legs swathed in blankets. “Remember that time in university when my paintings got manhandled and I got arrested for literally no good reason at all?” he asked Akira, who noded. “It was this douchebag who interrogated me.”

Akira sighed. He should have known better than to believe that Kasuhito had simply stumbled upon an old report that for some reason documented Takanori’s ability to empathize with murderers. It wasn’t like Takanori to volunteer that information; Kasuhito must have either forced it out of him or done some sort of deep background search that certainly violated doctor-patient confidentiality. Or maybe he was desperate enough to guess and hope Takanori correctly predicting classified information was not a one-off coincidence. Seven missing girls and hardly any leads would make anyone desperate.

Meanwhile, Kasuhito was trying to convince Takanori to help by feeding him tidbits about their current case. Akira knew Takanori would give in eventually; he was too interested in horror and crime films to not jump at the chance to investigate something real. At this point, his friend was only resisting for the sake of his pride.

Finally, Takanori relented with a huff, swinging his legs out of his bed. “Give me at least half an hour,” he said, walking toward the bathroom, “Akira, please put food in Koron’s bowl, and Mr. Kusaka, you're treating me to breakfast because you're probably going to shove me out the door before I can actually make any food.” Takanori closed his bathroom door.

\---

The so-called murder room was scattered papers exploding out of their manila folder confines, empty coffee cups and takeaway boxes, chaos lit by bright white fluorescent lights. The mess stopped suddenly just a few feet from the back wall, a map covered in photos and colorful post-it notes and string and thumbtacks, as if the installation was sacred space.

Takanori strode into the room, papers fluttering in his wake as he made a beeline for the back wall. He stopped before the wall, arms crossed, eyes flitting from photo to note to photo to note, following the strings.

“Eight missing girls, all taken from local universities in the last eight months.” Kasuhito’s voice jolted Takanori out of his reverie.

“I thought you said seven,” replied Takanori, still not taking his eyes off the wall.

Kasuhito handed Takanori a folder. “I got news of a possible eighth when you were getting your guest credentials,” he said, “Mei Sakamoto, fits the profile. Any suggestions?”

“I need to see the bodies. But since you haven’t found any, I would guess that he’s not just killing them…” Takanori trailed off.

“How do you know he’s killing them?”

“They’re all about the same age, height, weight; they have long black hair and are pretty light skinned…”

“That’s why we thought all their cases are linked.”

Takanori continued as if he hadn’t heard Kasuhito. “It’s not about all of them, I think. It’s about one of them. He’s hiding his prize among all the others. And it’s not the first girl, or the last, because that’s just a pretty dumb thing to do—”

“So has he reached this special girl yet?” interrupted Kasuhito.

“I’m not sure. I don’t know how many girls he plans to take and I can’t tell what is motivation is without seeing their bodies, or at least a photo of them. And that’s something you don’t have,” Takanori said, finally turning away from the wall. “Why did you even drag me here if you don’t have bodies? I really can’t do anything more. Everything I just said is just speculation; I was just thinking out loud. You have Akira, and probably a host of other people who could do this better than I could.”

Kasuhito raked a hand through his hair. The young man before him was really wasted as an artist, he thought. “You already made a point no one else has from looking at what we do have,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the wall, “We all thought each one of these girls was taken for a reason.”

“Covering up which girl is the special one is a reason,” Takanori retorted.

“You know what I mean,” Kasuhito said with a sigh. Then his phone rang and he started walking out of the room, beckoning Takanori to follow.

\---

“She was always such a good girl. She promised to come home this weekend and eat dinner with us, feed our cat, they loved each other...maybe she made plans with her friends and forgot to tell us? Even though that’s not like her…” Mrs. Sakamoto sniffed. “Is there any chance that she’s still alive?”

Kasuhito shook his head. “We just don’t know.”

“Where’s your cat?” Takanori interrupted.

“What?” replied Mrs. Sakamoto, confused by the apparent non-sequitur.

“Your cat. Did you feed it when Mei didn’t? Where is it? It must be hungry and grumpy if it didn’t get food all weekend...I mean, I’m not much of a cat person but Koron whines so much when I get too engrossed in a project and don’t refill his food bowl and he’ll come into my studio and I can’t resist his little puppy stare, you know?”

Mrs. Sakamoto started. “I-I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“Masumoto.”

Takanori turned his head in Kasuhito’s direction to see the man signaling him to meet him in another room and walked over to meet the other man’s questioning face. “She must have come home and fed the cat first, maybe when her parents were out. He took her from here,” he explained.

Eyes widening, Kasuhito whipped out his phone. “This apartment is a crime scene. Send the full team,” he snapped into it. Walking back into the other room, he asked Mrs. Sakamoto to show him and Takanori to Mei’s bedroom.

Outside the door, Takanori closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself as he took a tentative step into the room. Opening his eyes revealed baby blue blankets swathing the girl laying in bed, gently complimenting her pale face and dark hair. Her eyes were closed and the room was quiet. Until one brought a hand to her face and realized she was not breathing, one could have thought she was simply sleeping. It was almost tranquil. Takanori slowly walked to the edge of the bed and gingerly lifted a corner of the blanket with a latex gloved hand as his eyes raked analytically over the girl’s body, still clothed under the sheets. Two small red spots of blood by her stomach stood out, visible against her nightdress.

_He bears down on her chest and squeezes her throat. He can feel her pulse, her heartbeat, her life, flowing under his hands. She’s beautiful, he thinks. He wants to—_

“Anything interesting?”

Takanori whipped his head up to glare at the girl who interrupted him. Her light blond hair and makeup contrasted deeply with the latex gloves and lab coat she wore. Takanori figured that she was one of the forensic specialists that was called to the scene. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

“I found antler velvet in some of her wounds,” she continued, seeming to have ignored his comment, “It’s almost as if she was gored or something.”

Takanori thought for a moment. “Antler velvet has a lot of nutrients,” he says, “It promotes healing. I think he put it in her wounds on purpose.”

“You think he was trying to heal her?” asked Kasuhito, skeptical. He had walked into the room when he heard voices.

“He wanted to undo what he did to her as much as he could. He tucked her back into bed, tried to heal her...she’s an anomaly,” said Takanori, frowning slightly, “This is an apology.”

“Is she his prize?”

Takanori shrugged and pushed his way out of the room.

\---

Takanori walked into the murder room the next morning to a sigh of disapproval from a red-faced Akira. He’s not sure what he did wrong, actually; he knew he looked pretty tired and there were a few ink splatters on his hands from his middle-of-the-night drawing after he woke up from a nightmare, but it wasn’t like he’d been forced to help with this investigation. He wouldn’t be here if he was. As he continued walking toward the back of the room, Akira gestured in his direction while giving a pointed glare at Kasuhito then turned around and walked out with a huff.

Takanori frowned, still unsure about why Akira was so upset, as he greeted Kasuhito, who nodded in return. “What were you talking to Akira about?” Takanori asked.

Kasuhito looked to the side slightly, as if deciding whether to actually tell Takanori. “He wanted me to take you off the case and leave you alone,” he replied, “I told him that you made the first major breakthrough of this case and that I need you, which is true. But if it wasn’t clear, especially with the way I came into your apartment, which I apologize for—”

“If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be,” Takanori interrupted.

Kasuhito nodded. “Good. So then, what did you mean when you said before that the killer was apologizing for Mei Sakamoto? What kind of psychopath apologizes for murdering a girl?”

Takanori shook his head slightly as he tried to return to the headspace he had been in before he had been interrupted yesterday. “He feels bad,” he said, “He couldn’t show her that he loved her, so he put her body back where he’d found her, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don’t know if ‘love’ is the best way to put it…”

Before the pair could continue further, two people in white lab coats walked in. Takanori recognized the blonde forensics girl from yesterday as she handed a folder to Kasuhito, who promptly flipped it open to scan the contents. He frowned. “No physical evidence other than a piece of metal?” he asked, addressing the three.

The other lab coat, a man with short dark hair, shook his head. “No,” he replied, “but we’ve traced the type and coating of the metal to a particular type of pipe. It’s often used in construction, apparently.”

“Her wounds suggest that her body was pierced through by something like antlers or horns,” the blonde girl piped up, “but they were all probably made postmortem. The cause of death was actually strangling, suffocation. Her ribs were broken. She had liver cancer, though. Not to sound insensitive, but she would probably have died soon anyway.”

“We almost didn’t find out about the cancer actually. For some reason her liver had been removed, but then it was sewed back in,” added the first man.

Takanori started, beginning to understand the strange feeling of love and possession he had felt from the killer when looking at Mei Sakamoto’s body. “Something was wrong with the meat,” he muttered, almost to himself.

“What?” Takanori couldn’t tell who had asked that.

“He’s...I think he’s eating them.”

And with that revelation, the two forensics specialists left, looking slightly disgusted. As they walked away, Kasuhito received a call on his phone and followed them out while answering, leaving Takanori alone in the murder room. He pouted, pulled out a random chair, and sat down in front of the map wall with the forensics report Kasuhito had left on his way out in his hand.

About five minutes later, Kasuhito returned, chatting amicably with another person. Takanori was already trying to return to the killer’s headspace, eyes moving from point to point between the wall and the report in his hand; he barely noticed the presence of the other two until Kasuhito gently shook him out of thoughts. “I’d like you to meet Dr. Yutaka Uke. He’ll be helping us with the psychological profile,” said Kasuhito.

So the stranger was a psychologist or psychiatrist, thought Takanori, instinctively cringing internally and not meeting Yutaka’s eyes. He didn’t like those. He used to always get sent to them when his art became too graphic as a reaction to some particularly nasty murder he saw on the news. They were the reason he began to make his work more and more abstract over the past few years.

He should have expected the other to notice his reaction as a soft voice floated down to his ears. “I take it you’re not a fan of us shrinks, then?” Yutaka asked, chuckling lightly in an almost self-deprecating manner.

The extremely non-clinical, non-therapist sounding tone surprised Takanori enough to look up at the man. He was greeted with a warm smile that made him relax slightly. “I haven’t had a good experience, to say the least,” he replied. Meeting the other man’s eyes, he quickly forced himself to look away.

Yutaka noticed, of course. “Don’t like eye contact either?” he asked.

Takanori shook his head. “They say eyes are the windows into the soul. I have enough going on in my own head; I don’t want to deal with others.”

“You read people easily, not just their bodies. What you see and learn touches everything else in your mind. You can assume anyone’s point of view if you tried hard enough. And sometimes that scares you, doesn’t it?” Yutaka spoke gently.

Takanori stiffened visibly in his chair. “Whose profile is he working on?” he spat at Kasuhito.

“I’m sorry. I was just observing. I can’t turn it on and off any more than you can—” Yutaka responded before Kasuhito could, still softly, as if he was afraid of spooking Takanori away.

Takanori glared. “Don’t psychoanalyze me. You won’t like me when I’m psychoanalyzed.”

Yutaka kept smiling gently despite Takanori’s vitrol. “I promise I’m here to help with this killer’s profile,” he told him, “I think I’m beginning to see how.”

As he stood up to walk away for some fresh air, Takanori thought about the real reason he had broken eye contact with Yutaka so quickly. He had seen death behind those warm brown eyes. The smiling man was not completely who he claimed to be.

Game on, Dr. Uke.


End file.
